“Do not let the great emptiness of Khazad-dûm fill your heart, Gimli, son of Glóin. For the world has grown full of peril. And in all lands, love is now mingled with grief.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

This quote has been reverberating around my head for a couple of days now. TFoTR has always been one of the moral compasses I use in the world. There’s so much in there about hope and doing the right thing, even when you are facing incredible odds. About being small and flawed and standing up anyway.

When I saw my psychiatrist yesterday, I told him my heart was heavy and I’m struggling with my depression and anxiety, and he said to me, “The world is fucked up. That’s a medical term, by the way. That’s official.”

The world is fucked up. I have The-World-Is-Fucked-Up-Itis.

I cried myself to sleep last night and this morning I cried through my coffee.

The world is fucked up.

Our President is authorizing horrible, inhuman, immoral, unethical things to be done. To children and families.

I share DNA with people who have been long buried in mass graves in Belarus; men, women and children who rode in rail cars and who wound up as ash on the wind at Auschwitz. Their fear and that horror is something that all of us who share that DNA carry, in some part, I think.

We have seen this before. We know how this ends.

The cries of those children in that recording from NPR, they are echoing in my head. The laughter of the ICE agents.

We have heard this laughter before. We have heard those cries before.

My husband said, as he rubbed my back and offered comfort last night, that sometimes prayer makes him feel better in times like these. I told him I didn’t know if God even existed, for how could God let horrors like these happen? To innocent children. How could God be so cruel to watch this happen and do nothing? How could God let evil like this happen? I told him I thought God was dead**. I went to sleep devoid of hope and sure of God’s demise.

Still full of tears.

I woke up this morning, cried into my coffee, because I am still so full of tears, but I also felt better. I felt hopeful because when I woke up I realized that maybe I chose to be here now. That maybe I was born into this time and place for a reason. No, I don’t believe in the God of the Old or New Testament. I don’t believe that there’s an old white dude in the sky who will make this stop. But I do believe that there is something in each of us, a little piece of the Divine Spark that we each carry inside. And maybe it’s up to us to do something. Maybe WE are the hands of the Divine, on earth. And maybe that’s why we are here now. To fight this, with everything we have.

Or you know, we could just ignore it and focus on our own pleasures and America first, until it rolls over the world like a wave. Because if we don’t fight, it will.

“…the fires of Isengard will spread and the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And—and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone….”

Maybe right now we need to be like Sam and Frodo and walk to fucking Mordor if that’s what it takes, because the Darkness must be beaten back and it doesn’t matter if we’re small and alone. We’re all we’ve got.

We’re all those kids have got right now. All those parents have got.

I am still full of tears. But I am also filled with certainty that right now, in this time and place, there is a war being waged and it is time to choose sides.

I choose Light.

I choose Love.

And I will do the best I can, with what has been given to me.

It’s a small realization, but it’s making me feel better and giving me a little light to find my way in the darkness today.

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”

**not an invitation for my many atheist pals to chime in here, ok? Thanks. I believe, you don’t, and that’s ok.

Second, you know I work the polls at the elections. I’ve been doing so since the General Election in 2012. This year, for the primary that was just a few weeks ago, I was AMAZED at the turnout. We had far more people coming to vote (and coming to drop off their vote by mail envelopes) than I’ve seen in past mid-term primaries. And I mean BY A LOT. We had almost 400 voters, and something like 100 VBM ballots come in. Usually, for mid-term primaries, we see about 100 or so voters and maybe 10-15 VBM ballots. And I heard people saying things like:

“I usually don’t vote in the primaries, but we can’t be complacent now.”

“I normally only vote in presidential elections, but these people need to be stopped.”

“It’s more important than ever right now to VOTE.”

“We need to resist and we need to fight, and the best way I know how is to VOTE THEM OUT.”

So working the polls during this, more than anything else, has given me a sense of hope. People are paying attention, and those who can’t (or won’t) go to protests or write their elected officials are getting out and voting.

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Doula

I’m a full spectrum doula when I’m not in the art studio. I offer compassionate and professional support to all families for all the possible outcomes of pregnancy. My practice is 100% inclusive of traditional, LGBT, poly, surrogate parents, adoptive parents, birth parents, and single parents. Because the last thing you need during a major life transition is judgment about your choices.

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